A Docker Captain's Blog

Docker | Kubernetes | Cloud

Category: Meetup

“As you grow up, make sure you have more networking opportunities than chances, and more collaborative approach than just an acquaintance. Reason ~ “Sharing is Caring”.

Docker’s Birthday Celebration is not just about cakes, food and party. It’s actually a global tradition that is near and dear to our heart because it gives each one of us an opportunity to express our gratitude to our community of contributors, customers, partners and users. The goal of this global celebration is to welcome those new to Docker and bring them up to speed through hands-on labs with the help of more advanced users who act as mentors on-site.

This year, celebrations all over the world took place March 19-25, 2018. Yesterday we celebrated Docker’s 5th Birthday in Bangalore at Altimetrik Office, Electronic City. This time I was lucky enough to get chance to lead this event.

I started planning for this event in the first week of March. Started interlocking with Community Marketing Co-ordinator, Docker Inc. and ordered for Docker Mentor T-shirts, birthday stickers & Docker crafted Balloons. It just took 1 week time to get it shipped to Bangalore address. Quite quick, isn’t it? A Special thanks to Lisa McNikol for helping me with these stuffs. Next, Neependra Khare, Founder of CloudYuga & Docker Bangalore Meetup organizer initiated a thread for looking out Mentors for the event. Around 10+ community members turned up to mentor the participants for lab sessions. I started interlocking with them for the lab preparation. A BIG SHOUT OUT to each and every mentors (names listed towards the end) as I find them quite interested and were very quick in completing the testing with the lab sessions. Few of the issues reported were fixed and handled smoothly.

Next, it was time to work with the organizers at Altimetric India. A special thanks to Sonali Baluni, Altimetrik Employee for multiple interactions on phone and emails for planning this event. Over 30+ balloons, 5kg Docker Birthday Cake, goodies for organizer and participants, smoothening WiFi connectivity & Backups were planned for the day.

Over 200+ participants signed up while 50+ turned up for this event. This was expected as we just completed Joint Meetup with 8 vibrant groups last weekend in Walmart Office. I reached venue at around 8:30 AM and was stoked to find wonderful ambience in place. Worked with organizers to arrange Docker T-shirts and Balloons for the participants, distributed Mentors T-Shirts so that they can get ready for the celebration.

I started the Birthday celebration with an attention grabber –

Talked about the agenda for the day which included more networking, mentorship & lab practice as shown –

Next, I asked each of Docker Mentors to introduce themselves to the group. Mentors are group of experts targeted to help the participants with the lab sessions.

Most of the participants followed the instructions on their own and where ever needed, mentors helped the participants. There were around 5 Lab sessions categorised under Docker 101, MTA with Java and .Net applications, Kubernetes and Hybrid OS applications. You can find it under https://github.com/dockersamples/docker-fifth-birthday

At 11:30 sharp, we did a cake cutting. We gave chance to youngest member in the group to do this honour.

This time I focused on networking and spent considerable amount of time interlocking with the participants. I met with new Community members and tried to understand how they are using Docker. Few of interesting questions from the community were –

What I liked most about this Meetup is the energy and curiosity that the participants have. It was a blast discussing with, answering and questioning all the keen minds that make up this community.

Dockercon 2018 is happening this June 12-15. I have plan to attend this event. Would be completely excited to meet more members of the Docker community over at DockerCon in June and hope to bring home interesting knowledge and tips & tricks for the larger Docker Bangalore Meetup to gain from.

Today I spoke at Docker Bangalore Meetup which took place in IBM India Systems Development Lab(ISL) – an R&D Division located at Manyata Embassy Business Park. Docker Bangalore Meetup Group is one of the most highest registered (holds around 5000+ registered Docker users currently) in India. Founded in November 22, 2013, it is now 4 year old and has been led by a Docker Captain & Founder of CloudYuga, Neependra Khare who has been actively organising this event since its birth. This event was Live streamed using Google HangOut and most of the sessions are available under YouTube here.

This time I chose “An Introduction to LinuxKit” topic as I spent considerable amount of time writing
blogs around LinuxKit, InfraKit, Moby and it’s supported platforms. Since DockerCon 2017, I have written around 6-7 blogs primarily on LinuxKit on various platform and this was one great chance to meet with Docker enthusiasts and clarify around Docker Vs Moby Vs LinuxKit.

Neependra started the Meetup talking about Moby. He clarified most of the facts around “Docker ! = Moby” and talked around Moby tool. He touched upon LinuxKit YAML file and demonstrated docker-17.06-ce container service built by Moby tool & LinuxKit toolkit. It was overall very interactive session and there were couple of great questions from the audience related to Moby assemblies. Docker Captain, Sreenivas Makam from Cisco delivered a great deep-dive talk around “Docker networking – Common issues and troubleshooting techniques”. He brought up interesting troubleshooting techniques and common issues around Docker Networking and you can find his impressive slide here.

I was the 2nd speaker on the row. I started my talk with “Why LinuxKit?” and spent considerable amount of time talking about the problem statement which led to the birth of LinuxKit. I walked through the audience on LinuxKit & introduced new Moby playground called as “Play with Moby“. In case you’re new, Play-with-moby (PWM) is a site made by Docker captains Marcos Nils and Jonathan Leibiusky as an extension of PWD. PWM is a Moby playground which allows you to try different components of the platform in seconds. It gives you the experience of having a free Alpine Linux Virtual Machine in the cloud where you can build and run Moby projects and even create clusters to experiment. Under the hood DIND or Docker-in-Docker is used to give the effect of multiple VMs/PCs.

At the end of the session, I demonstrated around “Building Docker containers using LinuxKit”. I enjoyed talking around LinuxKit Packaging System” during which there were numerous interesting queries from the audience. You can refer the below slides to get the glimpse of the talk.

Few of interesting questions around Moby & LinuxKit:

How does LinuxKit implementation works for bare metal system?

Can I build CentOS based LinuxKit Operating System as we use CentOS primarily on IBM Power System S822LC?

Can I use my own customised Kernel and get it work under LinuxKit YAML?

Is LinuxKit completely open source?

What is the story of Volume mount in terms of LinuxKit? What about the data persistence?

Special thanks goes to all the speakers for the valuable sessions. I have been closely watching the feedback and I could read that the audience liked the event and enjoyed the informative session. Thanks to IBM ISL Team for your sponsorship and a great lunch at the end of the day.

If you are keen to learn what’s happening in LinuxKit, Moby & Docker space, don’t miss out the below links –

Are you still thinking whether or not to attend Dockercon 2017? Still finding it difficult to convince yourself or your boss/manager to allow you to attend this conference? Then trust me, you have come to the right place. For the next 30 minutes, I will talk about the great sessions which you can’t miss to attend this year.

Dockercon 2017 is just 1 month away. Heavily power-packed with 3 keynotes( includes Solomon Hykes impressive talk), 7 tracks, 60+ breakout sessions, workshops, Ask the Experts, Birds-of-a-feather, Hands-on Lab, Ecosystem expo and lot more.. this year DockerCon 2017 brings a three-day impressive event schedule in capital of the U.S. state of Texas, Austin.Featuring topics, contents & workshops covering all aspects of Docker and it’s ecosystem,Dockercon has always given a chance to meet and talk to like-minded professionals, get familiar about the latest offerings, upcoming Docker releases & roadmap, best practices and solutions for building Docker based applications. Equally it has always provided opportunity to the community users to know what and how are they using Docker in their premises and in the Cloud.

April 17-21 2017 | Austin, TX | DockerCon 2017

Dockercon 2017 is primarily targeted for Developers, DevOps, Ops, System Administrators, Product Manager and IT executives. Whether you are Enablement Solution Architect for DevOps and containers, OR Technical Solution Architect; whether you are part of IoT Development Team OR AWS/Azure DevOps Engineer; whether you are Principal Product Engineer OR Product Marketing Manager, Dockercon is the place to be. Still wondering how would this conference help your organization in adopting containers and improving your offerings in terms of containerized application for your customer? I have categorized the list of topics based on the target audience. Hope it will help you gather data points to convince yourself and your boss.

As a developer, you are a core piece of your organization, busy developing new versions of your flagship software meant to run your software in various platforms. You are responsible for developments leveraging the target containerized platform’s capabilities and adapting and maintaining release artifacts to deliver a compelling experience for your users.Below lists of sessions might help you to develop the better containerized software –

As a Product Manager, you are actually CEO of your product and responsible for the strategy, roadmap, and feature definition for that product or product line. You love to focus on the problems, not on the solutions. You are gifted to excel at getting prospects and customers to express their true needs. Below list of the sessions might interest you to attend:

As a system administrator, you are the only person who is responsible for the uptime, performance, resources, security, configuration, and reliable operation of systems running Docker applications . Below sessions might interest you to manage your Dockerized environment in a better way –

As a Solution Architect, you are always busy with definition and implementation of reference architectures, capturing business capabilities and transform them into services leveraged across the platform and not to miss out – designing infrastructures for critical applications and business processes in a cost effective manner. Below lists might interest you to shape your containerized solutions in a better way:

Don’t you think attending Dockercon gonna be a great investment for you and your career?If yes, then what are you waiting for? Docker Team has something really cool for you to get started –